Greetings eager adventurers!
We're happy to announce The Black Grimoire: Cursebreaker Early Access is now live! What the EA currently includes is a fully functioning main story quest chain (we hope you will be surprisingly challenged by the last boss), a large open map to explore and a number of side quests/content to find (much more of that to come soon in future patches).
We will be posting a roadmap of the major content additions we have planned for the coming year soon.
However, for now we'd just like to quickly address a few of the concerns that we have seen commonly popping up:
Frequently asked questions
"Inventory is too small!":
This is perhaps the most frequently raised issue at the moment. The way the inventory currently works, it constrains player xp-progression and raw power (in terms of how many consumables you can carry, for example). Additionally, a lot of the content in the game is already balanced around a limited inventory.
We're aware having to manage a limited inventory is not everyone's cup of tea, even as they otherwise may be attracted by the game. However, we do think that much of the current frustration from players of the demo so far may stem from the fact that the early crypt area presents players with lots of new items that they have no way of dealing with (storage access is gained a bit later), nor do they have a concept yet of what items are valuable for their situation (in other words they loot everything).
We've already made some adjustments to alleviate this, but we'll be keeping our eye on the situation and the feedback, and we're prepared to make changes where it seems needed.
"WASD movement?":
It's requested widely enough that we'll probably add it in the coming months as an experimental feature. Our current pathfinding system isn't technically designed for it, so it may not look pretty, but yes it can be added.
"Performance is baddd!":
Yes, we are very aware of performance issues and will definitely keep working on it. We'll prioritize the worst stutters that happen in the more demanding areas, which are the large cities and their immediate surroundings. Afterwards we'll tackle more overall performance. We will work on improving it as we go.
"Keybinds?":
There have been some complaints about the lack of keybinds. We just wanted make sure everyone knows there are shortcuts/keybinds in the game this very moment, even if the game hasn't necessarily done the best job communicating that. But you can open options, and there you can find default keybindings as well as customize them. Just so everyone's aware.
"Quest rewards disappearing?":
Some concerns were raised about this, which seemed to be the case regarding specific types of items in the demo. But for the EA build it has already been fixed. If your inventory is full when you recieve item rewards from quests, the rewards should always spawn on the ground.
"The game really needs more equippable item slots":
At the moment we're focused on filling the game with a good variety of items on the slots we have. Expanding the amount of item slots may be something we do later on in development.
"Is this going to be an MMO?":
In short, no. We'll continue experimenting with new multiplayer features, but if we do end up implementing something, it will be light co-op in nature, such as minigames or instances. But all content will always also be available offline.
These red magic barriers set the limit for explorable area in the world for the demo, so you shouldn’t expect to move past them.